OTTAWA — The Conservative government is planning to investigate
allegations in a new report that the Chinese government and its
agencies are torturing religious prisoners and harvesting their organs,
Tory MP Deepak Obhrai indicated on Thursday.

“We
take these allegations quite seriously, and we’ll look into that,” said
Obhrai, who is parliamentary secretary to Foreign Affairs Minister
Peter MacKay. “We’ll look to have it confirmed.”

The report,
prepared by former Alberta MP David Kilgour and international human
rights lawyer David Matas, included transcripts of recorded
conversations in Mandarin with hospital and detention-centre officials
who admitted they had organs available for transplants from Falun Gong
prisoners.

The Chinese government banned the practice of Falun
Gong in the country in 1999, and rounded up its members accusing them
of anti-government activities.

“What we’ve got here is a new,
shocking, different form of evil,” said Matas at a news conference.
“The Chinese Communist party sees the Falun Gong as an ideological
threat to the regime, because of the large numbers, the ability to
mobilize a large group of people, their commitment and their tenacity.”

Obhrai
said the government had already been concerned about the issue before
the report was released, asking the United Nations Special Rapporteur
on Torture to look into allegations of organ harvesting and human
rights violations.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in
Canada has denied the government has any policy to forcibly harvest
organs, dismissing the allegations as “rumours spread by the Falun
Gong.”

The report recommends the Canadian government revoke
passports of citizens suspected of travelling to China for transplants
and stop Chinese doctors from studying transplants in Canada.